Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Playing Roads and Boats With Myself

Well, it has been a busy couple of weeks! I've had three all-day gaming sessions, a birthday (41) and bought a house. Tonight I finally got a chance to sit down and ... did I mention Scrabblette bought me Roads and Boats for my birthday? well she did ... and play Roads and Boats. Unlike my solo Runebound escapades I decided to use the official scoring rules etc for this game, so I sat down with the "Lord of the Ring" solitaire scenario to try to beat Werner Baer's score of 360. Given my poor showing last time I played Roads and Boats I didn't expect too much.

I soon realised that I'd need to approach the game strategically - I'd have to plan ahead to get the resources I'd think I'd need. I decided to build lots of rafts as there was a lot of water in the game. Indeed, I built a raft factory on Turn 5. However, due to poor planning I didn't build a raft until Turn 10. Then another on Turn 13, andother on Turn 15, and the game finished after Turn 20. Again, I think I should have encouraged some wild donkey sex early in the game so I had more land transporters, as the rafts came too late to help very much.

I figured out (at least, according to my understanding of the rules) that I only needed to build one brick in each layer of the Wonder to get all the Wonder points, so I set that as my target. I realised towards the end of the game that if I built more bricks in the wonder then I would score for more layers, so I'll be a bit more aggressive in that respect next time.

Anyway, as the game went on I decided my goal would be to produce a coin, as a stock bond was too much to ask for. So I built a mine and a charcoal burner to get the fuel and gold to make the coin. I produced the coin on Turn 20. Woohoo! My final score was 40 for the coin, 70 for the Wonder, for a grand total of 110 points! Not as good as 360 :-(. Stupidly, I also had a gold nugget lying on the ground that I hadn't realised I needed to pick up for another 10 points. Aargh!

Once I finished my head was full of ideas on what I'd done wrong so I wrote them all down for next time. Donkey sex, as mentioned above. Contributions to the Wonder, as mentioned above - another 4 contributions would have got me another 10 points. To get a second coin (and hence maybe a stock bond) I would have needed a specialised gold mine which required research which required a paper mill. I then went through and analysed what natural resources I would need to produce a stock bond, and I think it can be done. Maybe even by me. I need to use an oil rig instead of a charcoal burner to make fuel. I definitely need to optimise my transport routes, so I drew a map of where I currently think everything should go.